Advantage by Default
Fuck it, I’m D&D Oprah now. You get Advantage, and you get Advantage, and you get Advantage! In my ever-under-construction system, Prismatic Wasteland, I am currently leaning toward baking in an automatic way for players to gain Advantage on all their attribute tests. You are probably already calling the gaming authorities, but it isn’t a decision I come to lightly. Perhaps if I walk you through my reasoning, you’ll put down your pitchfork and pick up an extra d20 (or d12, but that’s a conversation for another day perhaps).
The Motive
I really like inventory management. If you are generally interested in OSRy stuff (which is likely if you found yourself in my neck of the online woods), you are already on board the “resource management is fun” train. However, tracking it can feel like a chore to some players. I think the reason for this isn’t an issue with resource management itself, so much as the “negative mechanic” problem. As my colleague, Michael Prescott of the Trilemma Adventures blog, observed, encumbrance rules are “a purely negative mechanic. There's nothing good that happens with encumbrance, it's all downside. Either you're as normal or penalized.”
I identify the same problem and adopt Michael’s solution: give a good outcome to be unencumbered instead of just a bad outcome to being encumbered. However, I am not using a 2d6 plus modifier system that is assumed in his post. Plus, I’m not a big fan of modifiers generally. Advantage is fun, it’s shiny, and players love it. So why not. But how?
The Means
I need to walk you through the current incarnation of Prismatic Wasteland’s core mechanic and encumbrance systems before I tell you how I integrated the Advantage by Default into it. Careful readers of this blog (and frankly even uncareful ones) will know that core mechanics have been on my mind as of late.
Prismatic Wasteland uses the blackjack “roll high, but under stat” system popularized as a core mechanic by Errant, with some small adjustments. The basic concept is that characters have a set of attribute scores (generated by rolling 3d6) and when you make an attribute test, it has a DC (degree of challenge. If you roll above your attribute, you fail. If you roll below your attribute and above the DC, you succeed. If you roll below both your attribute and the DC, it is a success with some drawback or cost. If you roll exactly your attribute, it is a critical success. If you roll exactly the DC, it is a critical failure. It is actually quite simple in practice. Especially if you just tell the players what the DC is before they roll, which adds the tension of everyone knowing what roll would mean critical failure while the player, who best knows their own attribute score, is best positioned to realize they have rolled a critical success.
Prismatic Wasteland uses typical slot based inventory, except it is bifurcated. Each character has an inventory that they fill with items (e.g., weapons, armor, gear, other do-dads) and a memory that they fill with ideas (e.g., skills, spells, languages). Your item capacity is equal to the greater of your Strength score or 10, and your idea capacity is equal to the greater of your Intelligence score or 10 (although certain morphotypes [my current preferred word for ancestry in my science fantasy game] like halflings and kobolds have an item capacity that is equal to the lesser of their Strength score or 10). Again, nothing here is particularly groundbreaking or novel.
Another thing to note is that Advantage and Disadvantage cancel each other out one-for-one and multiple sources of Advantage/Disadvantage can stack with each other. If there are more than 3 net Advantages, it is an automatic success, while if there are more than 3 net Disadvantages, it is an automatic failure.
The Opportunity
My simple rule for tracking encumbrance is thus:
A player character carrying fewer Item Slots than their Item Capacity has Advantage on all Strength and Dexterity Tests. A player character knowing fewer Idea Slots than their Idea Capacity has Advantage on all Intelligence and Charisma Tests.
A player character carrying more Item Slots than their Item Capacity has Disadvantage on all Strength and Dexterity Tests. A player character knowing more Idea Slots than their Idea Capacity has Disadvantage on all Intelligence and Charisma Tests.
And, by process of elimination, there is neither Advantage nor Disadvantage, if a given number of slots equals their given capacity exactly.
Advantage is a powerful carrot! But knowing that clever players are likely to always try to keep their slots low enough to have advantage in any given situation, I just assume advantage as the baseline. The difficulty quotient for Prismatic Wasteland thus ranges from 1 to 10, rather than the 0 to 8 outlined in Errant (and I always noted that failure was already pretty likely by default in Errant anyway). A totally ancillary benefit is that having the referee determine how difficult a task is on a scale from 1 to 10 is more intuitive to us arabic-numeral-brained individuals than basically any other scale (looking at you, d20 DC target system). I will need to test the system to make sure it feels satisfying, but I think the result will be that the players will equip themselves so they always have at least one source of ready advantage when they need it. And if they don’t? Well, they can always quickly roll up a new character once they die.
Let's run through a quick example. So in Prismatic Wasteland, each morphotypes has some drawback. I already alluded to the drawbacks for Kobolds and Halflings. But for Dwarves, whose ancestors settled the towering mountains of garbage in search of treasure eons ago, that drawback is something very relatable to yours truly: they can't throw anything away. Or, expressed mechanically, they must pass an DC 4 Charisma Test to remove any Item from their Inventory.
So let's say you have a dwarf with an average (10) Charisma, trying to toss out their outdated battleaxe. If they have exactly their maximum number of Item Slots in their inventory (i.e., no advantage or disadvantage), they only have a 25% chance of a full success, 20% chance of partial success and 5% chance of critical success. Those aren't great odds for a task of moderate difficulty! But if they have less than their maximum number of Item Slots filled (easier said than done for a hoarder), then the odds of a full success increase to ... actually this is a somewhat difficult math problem because it isn't just 2d20, take the highest, but 2d20 take the better result, which is ideally equal to or below 10 but above 5 with 10 exactly being the very best result. Needless to say, you have much better odds of tossing that battleaxe if you have already, well, tossed out that battleaxe. It isn't easy being a dwarf of trash mountain.
